It's Friday afternoon and it's quiet, almost too quiet. Your phone rings and it's the boss telling you to come to her office, now.
What is it now? I'm almost done with my TPS report and I have big plans this weekend!
You find your pen and something to write on, and head to her office. It's like this every last Friday of the month, a panic discussion about the end of the month metrics.
We're overrunning our IT and overhead budgets, what sales orders can be closed before the end of the month, and which suppliers we put off paying for another 30 days?
It's the same panic-attack every month, and the last branch chief was worse. We should be able to predict these things instead of going through all this drama. Some way of looking each week to see how we are doing. But we don't work on a manufacturing floor, we push paper around the office, we are completely different.
Wow, I think we have seen this situation play out more than once. The key here is not only figuring out how to avoid the panic attack, but to be able to predict how the month will end with plenty of time to respond. This journey certain starts with recognizing who the customer is and what do they want. If the thing we are working on goes to a customer whether inside or outside, we will use the Voice of the Customer (VOC) to develop our metrics. If there are corporate or team objectives we reaching for, we will use Voice of the Business (VOB) to develop the metrics.
The VOC conversation starts with something like "what are the things about my product that need to be perfect?". The "things" may focus on delivery, quality, cost, performance characteristics, or any other "thing" that may be on the customer's mind at that moment. You will need to guide the conversation based on some feedback you may have or you will spend weeks in the weeds chasing rabbits. These conversations will help improve the relationships with your paying customers and provide a creative outlet for the team to work toward instead of the day-by-day painting of rocks trying to find the color the customer wants.
The VOB conversation is based on those corporate objectives that come down at the beginning of the year, newly created government regulations, or corporate governance policies. The boss is giving you signals that you probably should not ignore and some exploration of details of how to execute policies can provide insight on how to measure the execution.
Take this information back to the team and explore their input on what those measures are and how that data is collected. Do you have systems that you work within that collect time and date stamps, who is contributing to or approving steps in the work flow, track travel budget or sales totals? These may be sources of data needed to create the metrics that can show if the team is on track or not. It may take a little time to create a baseline, but you will soon be on your way to avert being blind-sided.
When you have the metrics created, don't just hide them on the corporate share-point servers. Share them with the team, talk about the performance and maybe some root causes if the performance is not where it should be. Teach the team how to talk about performance improvement and don't use a bunch of Japanese or Six Sigma words to show everyone how enlightened you are. This is not a finger-pointing session.
In the mid-90's I worked for a telecommunication company in prototype manufacturing, building typical quantities from 1 to 10 with the median quantity being 2 or 3. Our model was Low Volume/High Mix and we were in the change-over business. The boss kicked-off one of our weekly staff meetings with the question, "Where is the waste in our processes?". This was an odd question, and instead of someone asking what he meant by "waste", the two main factions began to attack each other. The meeting did not end well, but it did start me thinking about how we transform information and material into circuit boards.
We had business goals (VOB), build prototype work orders in 3 days and pilot production work orders in 7 days. This was easy to think about in manufacturing, but I was leading the machine programmers, we were creating software programs and reports. In reality we had about 2 hours to complete our work that fed into the next steps of the process that eventually provided engineering with test results to a final customer that was buying our stuff.
Ultimately we had to show that we were helping to improve our processes and we did this through the use of metrics over time. Metrics that were reviewed on a weekly basis with the actual team doing the actual work. When we were aware of a problem, we would convene on that problem, talk about root causes, determine what to do about it, and update the deskguide we used for how we performed the work. And all this was tracked in our metrics based on the reports we were producing.
As you begin looking at what you do and what metrics are relevant, what you finally decide to use may be very different compared to what you started with. This is part of the journey, finding the right roads to take you where you are going. And if you want something quick and dirty to start with, three popular measures are On-time Delivery, Percent Complete Delivered, and Quality Yield. Remain positive with the team, some emotions will rise up and remind everyone that we are in this together.
What is it now? I'm almost done with my TPS report and I have big plans this weekend!
You find your pen and something to write on, and head to her office. It's like this every last Friday of the month, a panic discussion about the end of the month metrics.
We're overrunning our IT and overhead budgets, what sales orders can be closed before the end of the month, and which suppliers we put off paying for another 30 days?
It's the same panic-attack every month, and the last branch chief was worse. We should be able to predict these things instead of going through all this drama. Some way of looking each week to see how we are doing. But we don't work on a manufacturing floor, we push paper around the office, we are completely different.
Wow, I think we have seen this situation play out more than once. The key here is not only figuring out how to avoid the panic attack, but to be able to predict how the month will end with plenty of time to respond. This journey certain starts with recognizing who the customer is and what do they want. If the thing we are working on goes to a customer whether inside or outside, we will use the Voice of the Customer (VOC) to develop our metrics. If there are corporate or team objectives we reaching for, we will use Voice of the Business (VOB) to develop the metrics.
The VOC conversation starts with something like "what are the things about my product that need to be perfect?". The "things" may focus on delivery, quality, cost, performance characteristics, or any other "thing" that may be on the customer's mind at that moment. You will need to guide the conversation based on some feedback you may have or you will spend weeks in the weeds chasing rabbits. These conversations will help improve the relationships with your paying customers and provide a creative outlet for the team to work toward instead of the day-by-day painting of rocks trying to find the color the customer wants.
The VOB conversation is based on those corporate objectives that come down at the beginning of the year, newly created government regulations, or corporate governance policies. The boss is giving you signals that you probably should not ignore and some exploration of details of how to execute policies can provide insight on how to measure the execution.
Take this information back to the team and explore their input on what those measures are and how that data is collected. Do you have systems that you work within that collect time and date stamps, who is contributing to or approving steps in the work flow, track travel budget or sales totals? These may be sources of data needed to create the metrics that can show if the team is on track or not. It may take a little time to create a baseline, but you will soon be on your way to avert being blind-sided.
When you have the metrics created, don't just hide them on the corporate share-point servers. Share them with the team, talk about the performance and maybe some root causes if the performance is not where it should be. Teach the team how to talk about performance improvement and don't use a bunch of Japanese or Six Sigma words to show everyone how enlightened you are. This is not a finger-pointing session.
In the mid-90's I worked for a telecommunication company in prototype manufacturing, building typical quantities from 1 to 10 with the median quantity being 2 or 3. Our model was Low Volume/High Mix and we were in the change-over business. The boss kicked-off one of our weekly staff meetings with the question, "Where is the waste in our processes?". This was an odd question, and instead of someone asking what he meant by "waste", the two main factions began to attack each other. The meeting did not end well, but it did start me thinking about how we transform information and material into circuit boards.
We had business goals (VOB), build prototype work orders in 3 days and pilot production work orders in 7 days. This was easy to think about in manufacturing, but I was leading the machine programmers, we were creating software programs and reports. In reality we had about 2 hours to complete our work that fed into the next steps of the process that eventually provided engineering with test results to a final customer that was buying our stuff.
Ultimately we had to show that we were helping to improve our processes and we did this through the use of metrics over time. Metrics that were reviewed on a weekly basis with the actual team doing the actual work. When we were aware of a problem, we would convene on that problem, talk about root causes, determine what to do about it, and update the deskguide we used for how we performed the work. And all this was tracked in our metrics based on the reports we were producing.
As you begin looking at what you do and what metrics are relevant, what you finally decide to use may be very different compared to what you started with. This is part of the journey, finding the right roads to take you where you are going. And if you want something quick and dirty to start with, three popular measures are On-time Delivery, Percent Complete Delivered, and Quality Yield. Remain positive with the team, some emotions will rise up and remind everyone that we are in this together.
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